Tag Archives: sswindon

I am all for a fair fight, good open debate and accepting the results at the end, whatever they may be. My own campaign against the yes2av lobby is, I hope, a good example of putting an alternative argument forward so that people can make up their own minds, albeit that I do hope that my arguments do influence people towards my way of thinking.

And so I am appalled the read via another blog quoting from The Spectator that the Electoral Reform Society, who would have much to gain financially from a Yes2av vote being successful, are sponsoring that campaign. Read the blog and reference to the article here and make up your own mind.

It is old news maybe, having been published in late Feb this year, but was news to me until this morning.

Deciding who will represent you in parliament and, ultimately, who will run the country is not a marketing survey.

If someone asks you to rate your top 5 or 10 hotel chains, supermarkets, airlines, fashion outlets or whatever then ranking them in order makes sense. It gives a feel for how people see the market and who they rate as number one. You could do the same with one of those, for me puerile, talent and reality shows to decide who to vote off.

But deciding the outcome of an election this way is, to me, completely bonkers.

Yes, I want to see electoral reform and a better way of representing the people, but I do not believe that AV has any place in such reform, so I’m voting No.

Having had more Vote Yes for AV material thrust at me the delicious irony of the 5th May referendum has finally broken through to me: The vote is a first past the post one! If more people vote for it than against it will succeed, and will do so by the very system that it desires to eradicate,

So it 15% of the population vote for it, and less than that vote against, it will be passed by a minority.

Given that a few luvvies are queueing up to urge a Yes vote from their fans (who will no doubt vote Yes without understanding why), and that there is a small campaign in favour, but no apparent cry to oppose, we face the strong possibility of having a political nonsense thrust upon us. As WSC might have put it; “never in the field of politics have so few done such damage to so many” (well, other than New Labour of course).

We need change, but not this one. Perhaps I should take to the streets.

Despite many of my friends seeming to support the proposed change to the way we elect our politicians I will be voting No on May 5th.

I am in favour of electoral reform, and think that a change is overdue, but this solution is, I think, very poorly designed and unlikely to give us anything better than we have now. In fact I truly think that it could make things worse.

It is a shame that, after waiting so long for there to be a chance of doing something better, all that is on offer is such an appalling mess. I hope that it does not come to fruition, but am concerned that if my wish comes through it will be a while before we get another chance. Even so, I cannot see the point in voting for change just for the sake of it, especially one that I think is so bad, and so I shall be putting my cross in the No box.

I woke to blue skies and sunshine and the 13 year blight of the champagne Marxists finally over. Despite the weather on the South coast being none too good I signed up a new client for one of my business mentoring packages so, all in all, it’s been a good day really.

The trip over to East Anglia yesterday yielded only Tory posters and signs again, and the run to Cheltenham this morning was enlivened by a solitary Labour sign to break up the Tory/Lib Dem monopoly.

The LibDems held Cheltenham as one would have expected, and both Swindon seats were Tory gains from Labour, so a belated poke in the eye for the boundary fiddles of earlier in the Labour term of government.

The overall result is a disappointment for me as I wanted a better turnout and a decisive result. I find it interesting that there is so much bile floating around from Labour quarters. You came second, get over it, you may still end up sort of governing the country.

In my early blogs on the election I made the point that none of the main parties had an attractive enough package (I couldn’t even remember the names of Cameron and Clegg until halfway down the page that day if you recall). The current government have destroyed the country so even a moderately positive alternative should have rolled them over and consigned them to the dustbin if history where they belong. But that didn’t happen.

Let’s face it, John Major’s Conservative government weren’t that bad, (OK there may have been a rotten apple or two, but the current government are riddled with them; they’ve made sleaze an art form), but that grinning goon Tony B Liar and his cronies demolished them, so how come DC couldn’t do the same to the disgraceful shower that they faced? They were just not good enough to get the voters out in sufficient numbers.

Labour have nothing to crow about, losing 20% odd of their MPs and a fair few ministers amongst them. The political map of the UK doesn’t show much red, and the English portion is largely blue, with the LibDems not doing too well either, despite all the ridiculous media hype about their leader.

A sad day for the UK, and that means all of us. Once again we can’t rely on our politicians so we’ll have to look to our business leaders to pull the country round despite the former groups failings. They will, given room to manoeuvre, and anyone who complains about their pay packets… I’ll leave it there.

I had to go over to my local health centre last week for a periodic check up. As I’m getting closer to three score years it’s good to keep a check on how the old body is doing, and I’m pleased to say that it’s not too bad at all. A couple of things I need to watch, but I’m doing better than maybe they thought, and this is the issue. I knew that I was doing better than the numbers that they told me I needed to be around because I had the same set of blood tests a couple of months ago at the hospital.

Bearing in mind that we are talking about two establishments both part of the Swindon NHS trust and barely two miles away from each other as the crow flies why is the information not shared?

How much time was wasted on two appointments for the tests, two more appointments for the results, two sets of postage to send the samples plus all of the consumables involved, two lots of tests?

I know the anti big brother mob are rabidly against centralising information, but this is an area where surely it would have made sense to have made the first test results available to my general practioner’s office? With all the waste in costs why oh why does this sort of thing go on?

When I had the first of the two operations at the NHS hospital I signed a form and that released all of my notes and test results from the private hospital that I had seen previously about that health issue, so if we can swap data between the private and public services, why can’t two parts of the same public service do the same?

What saddens me most is that money and time has ben wasted on me that could have benefited somone who really needed it. This government has done so much damage to the NHS it is hard to believe that it was a Labour party idea in the first place.

Yesterday we saw two Labour posters in Swindon. At last some evidence of opposition. We also got a Labour leaflet stuffed through the door. Am I being targeted because of the blogs? Who knows, but at least a sign of activity.

Today I’ve been over to the Essex/Herts border, but little sign of any posters. Maybe I was concentrating more on the traffic, but I’m doing the same trip again on polling day, so will try and look out for signs of action.

Well, that’s April done with. Less than a week to go now and I’ve posted my vote off today just in case I don’t get back in time to vote on Thursday.

I’ve not been out and about today other than a walk over to the pharmacy this afternoon and that yielded no sign of any posters or signs at all. It does seem very quiet in that respect this election, but I’m not sure why. Are the parties leaning more towards the media, internet and social networking?

As far as the latter goes, from what I’ve seen so far each tribe is shouting about itself. Some of what I read earlier about #bigotgate tends to suggest that there are Labour supporters that think GB had it right with his in car remarks, but then that doesn’t surprise me. Some of these people ought to look the word up in the dictionary and think about how they are behaving.

A pal has challenged me over my expression of sympathy for GB. Fair comment, but I meant it in the sense that many of us in leadership roles will have been caught out by something that we thought had been expressed in a private, and friendly, environment getting out to a wider audience. In case no-one has noticed we are all human and prone to cocking things up from time to time. Great leaders learn from mistakes more than from anything else and my sympathy was in terms of the isolated issue of the bloke relying on his henchpersons (doesn’t that beautifully illustrate what the idiot PC mafia have done to our language), but getting shafted because they all, including him, missed the microphone.

As a facilities manager I, like my colleagues, have handled loads of VIP visits, whether that be company people, celebs, politicos or royalty. The one thing that we are really good at is the details, having our people orgainised and having enough back up plans to cover everything that we can think of and a fair few that we can’t even imagine.It’s what we do day in, day out, so VIPs are fairly easy to slot in, regardless of how difficlut the individuals may be. In most cases the people themselves are fine, it’s the entourage (henchpersons) who are the problem and, as FMs, we’re well versed in working around them to make things a success regardless.

A big part of that is in watching people’s backs for them, and in doing so we don’t have any room for airs and graces or personal ego trips. We do what we have to and bask in the glory afterwards of nobody having even noticed that we were there or what we did. From watching the incident on TV my take on the GB team was that they had their minds on other things. When you are the point person you have to focus on your own job and rely on those around you to do theirs. Someone lost the plot. There have been other examples of live mics and making sure that GB had his taken off was a no-brainer, but it got missed, maybe because of the change of plan to bring in a tame vox pop, or so they thought.

To me the incident smacked of arrogance in more than one individual; the very sort of thing that we facilities managers jjust don’t have time for.

Anyway, I’ll stop typing now. Inadvertantly I’ve padded out this election report with an advert for FMs. Well deserved that may be, I shouldn’t really have included it here, but I’m not going to delete it all now.